According to the blog post, Pres. Obama bought the equipment himself, and the staff works on it in their spare time. Now, the video and the blog are taxpayer funded, so there's that. But after seeing that recipe - totally worth it.

+1 - I've used the Nostromo for just this purpose, and it was easy. The one I have has three different toggled layouts, so you can shift functions easily. The D-pad also maps to eight different functions, if you need it. And it has a built-in mousewheel, which is all sorts of useful.

On the one hand, I disagree very strongly with pretty much every policy proposed by Governor Romney. On the other hand, I like to hear things first and lord the knowledge over my colleagues. I also don't mind large political operations tracking my movements.

No. SOPA and PIPA authorize the Department of Justice to issue court orders. There is no hearing until after the orders have been executed, and no recourse until the entire website is already removed from the internet. The process is entirely administrative - the first notice a site owner receives is the letter they get after their site is gone.

So, unless you're lucky, you're now fighting a big media company in Federal Court with your source of funds (your website) shut down. This isn't tenable for the vast majority of site owners.

astroengine writes: "The first exoplanet ever to be directly imaged by the Hubble space telescope may not exist. In 2008, the world was in awe of the famous "Eye of Sauron" image of the star Fomalhaut's dusty ring — plus a slowly moving object that was identified as Fomalhaut b, a gas giant world approximately 3-times the mass of Jupiter. However, due to a strange orbital misstep detected between 2008 and 2009 photographs, the validity of Fomalhaut b's detection is being questioned, generating some controversy in the exoplanet community."Link to Original Source

Orome1 writes: Mysql.com has been hacked and is currently serving malware. Armorize has detected the compromise through its website malware monitoring platform HackAlert, and has analyzed how the compromise of the site's visitors unfolds. The mysql.com website is injected with a script that generates an iFrame that redirects the visitors to a page where the BlackHole exploit pack is hosted.Link to Original Source

Even if it could fly, all the shuttle could do would be to swap the 6 people up there for 6 different people. The issue is that the soyuz spacecraft already at the station have to come back to earth in October and November, as they cannot stay in orbit for more than 6 months without failing. Without new soyuz to replace the old, there would be no way for astronauts to escape back to earth - and, therefore, no astronauts.